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Monday, 10 June 2013

A day without the Internet

There comes a
time when a blogger or a writer is no longer capable of keeping in
control that urge to write. Your mental ramblings in a situation that
is either grotesque or somewhat peculiar, force you to write down a
testament of all that is going on. The eeriness of the mellowing air
and the grogginess in your crumbled mind, even they don't have the
power to keep your writing instinct at abeyance. You know it does not
make any sense and what you'd write down would eventually become
another victim of the lack of traffic from which your blog suffers.
But, you still want to write, not because of that feeling, not
because of those circumstances but because writing is no longer a
passion, it has become a ravenous desideratum. You can swivel and do
everything possible to move away, but as it turns out, your
conscience was never entirely in your control.

So, amidst
this situation, here I am in a hilly and lusciously green area of
Mumbai. One that seems to have an enormous proclivity to vest you in
itself and one where the ingeniously carved landscapes and harrowing
pathways are so exorbitantly arranged, that you develop genuine
appreciation for it. But wait, natural and architectural properties
are impressive but what about what fuels up a blogger ? This place
does not have any connectivity in regard of my cellphone and my USB
dongle network. Above all, all other viable networks get an exuberant
connectivity. As it turns out, I've arrived here today, and today
itself some network issues have crept in the nearby network
transmission systems. So, as fate may have it, an Internet hungry man
is compelled to sit here in this simple and sober room with the most
parsimonious of constituents and with windows that face the most
picturesque scene you're likely to imagine in Mumbai city.

Here I am,
with my inadvertent partner - my laptop, with my cellphone, with a
few bags surrounding me, two doors, one opening to a hallway and
other to a balcony, 2 windows which when opened are capable of
entwining you in the aroma of the scent of night, a bedding, a few
pairs of shoes, a few lights, a fan, a few wall mounted cupboards and
racks, a chair with basic stuff, and an All Out machine with Good
Knight liquid . One must be wondering that you've gotta be nuts to
mention even the most frugal of things in a scene but as it turns
out, I've got nothing else to notice. I have the two things which
till a few hours ago allowed me to connect to the rest of the world –
my cell which has a 3G connection and my laptop for which I have a
USB dongle. But now, here I lay, secluded from the rest of my world,
with the bliss of nature, but away from the bliss which silicon
valley and its entrepreneurs have bequeathed upon me since 1995.

It's not that
I gave up straightaway. I searched for networks, I used the cord
extension of my dongle, I tried accessing a prospective Wi-Fi network
which the households above me or below me might be using. You know
what, I am not erudite enough to break into their networks but I
simply had this rapacious craving to see a network signal with a few
bars on. Just that very feeling that you have a network around you,
those surreptitious waves hovering around you, their mellifluous
crests and troughs evangelizing your thoughts. But alas ! , there are
no active Wi-Fi networks as of now. After having tried every single
thing in my quiver of acquainted knowledge, I just kept viewing and
savoring the static content from Facebook and a few more pages that
were opened a little while ago when I had access to the Internet. I
couldn't load comments, which was obvious, I couldn't load new
Facebook notifications and messages, The Chat box kept saying
“Disconnected”. Then I turned to my Gmail page. Last mail was
loaded at 12:24 AM on the same day. Of course, it was just a matter
of a little while ago when my dongle was seething with all those
network bars. Even though I had read all mails, I opened them again
as they were still in cache and for that ephemeral instance, I
devoured the magic that is manifested in opening mails.

I moved on,
kept tethering to the cellphone screen to see any sign of network.
Wait ! It shows one bar, no 3G but one bar, maybe more will follow.
Yeah ! 2 bars now, 3,4,5 and finally it has all of them. I couldn't
help but thank god, the magnanimous, the prescient and the all
powerful god for attending to my plight and finally putting an end to
my tribulation. I no longer felt being captive. I enjoyed those
mighty sumptuous bars as their number kept decreasing and then
increasing every 2 seconds. I was finally brought out of the gallows,
I was set free. And then, then it shuddered me again. All bars went
away in the whip of a second. No more bars and situation returned to
where it all started. I still don't know if it happened for real or
if it was a preposterous imagination. I glued my eyes to the screen
of my cell so that I could find that out for myself. 5 minutes, no
network, 10 minutes, no sign yet. I had to unlock it again and again
as the automatic lock triggered after every few seconds of
inactivity. The exercise was futile.

And it was
then that I finally decided that this moment, this predicament, shall
not go in vain. That it shall form the 40th post and perhaps the 12th
or so ludicrous post of what is supposedly my alter ego - my blog. I
knew that blogging at this point of time and then reaping the
benefits of those gigantic 4 hits that follow every hour was not
possible, not now at least. So I opened a slate which can copy a blog
when it comes to the frolic that comes in undulating typing – The
LibreOffice. As I wrote this, I did not blog this in the conventional
sense. After all, blogs are about being all connected all the time.
Blogger keeps saving your draft every now and then and so did this
word processor. But whereas blogger saves it on its servers, this
processor saves it on my own machine. For the purpose of writing this
account, saving it first on my machine made more sense as it bears a
true testimony to the times we've spend here.

For the
first time, I blog without the officiousness of Facebook's frequent
notification sounds, without the mail refreshing actions that I
execute after every few minutes, without the twitter feed check out
which I do after every paragraph and without the Indivine link
posting and Facebook link posting that I always do subsequent to
writing a blog post. As it turns out, writing this blog required the
minimal of effort. Posting would require a little flex of fingers
later on but as of now, writing ensued like flow in a high speed
pipe. Nothing to worry about, no consideration about tags, no
concerns about how to create a promotion description of the post,
nothing. This was somewhere between pristine writing and prospective
blogging. I've drawn a clear line of demarcation between two actions
that were always supposed to be separate but which always mix up.
This time, I was made to do the former. I could take a few pictures
of the situation to describe it more vehemently, but I don't have the
data cable to transfer pictures to the laptop right now and to
inculcate them in this post. I can obviously do that later but once
this post is finalized now at this point of time, I don't want
anything to deprive it of its originality. It is a standalone account
of this time when I actually felt some kind of lecherie for an
Internet connection. I don't have a connection now but I'll get one
any moment And eventually this blog post too will make its way.
Because no matter what happens, there's connectivity at the end of
every secluded tunnel ! This is where this account ends. A brief
description of how I spent nearly a day that hereby ends with an
unusual fanaticism, and A day without the Internet!